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Abstract
In this article on Sub-Umbra, I firstly discuss the main features and themes of the discourse of pornography and sexuality in the nineteenth century and the linguistic characteristics typifying that discourse. Secondly, I analyze the excerpts from the novel describing female bodies and referring to female and male genitalia where the strategies of the discourse of pornography are more salient. What emerges from this linguistic investigation is that the male narrator's remarks about those bodies and body parts are consistently furnished by means of value-laden lexemes. Their main discursive function proves to be that of intermingling physical attributes with sexuality and lust, thereby representing those attributes as the causes of sexual desire.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editors of the journal and the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their invaluable comments and advice.
Notes
1. [1.1] a finely developed blonde, with deep blue eyes, pouting red lips; [2.1] a graceful Grecian type of face, rosy cheeks, large grey eyes, and golden auburn hair, lips as red as cherries, and teeth like pearls, frequently exhibited by a succession of winning smiles, which never seemed to leave her face; [3.1] a beautiful brunette of about three-and-twenty, with a most bewitching expression of countenance; [3.1.1] her large, full, dark eyes; [4.1] a charming dark-eyed brunette, her rather large mouth having a fascinating effect as you regarded her; [4.2] such a display of pearly white teeth, I never saw before.
2. [1.1] a finely developed blonde; a full heaving bosom; [2.1] a sprightly beauty of the Venus height, well proportioned in leg and limb, full swelling bosom.
3. [1.1] a full heaving bosom, [1.1.1] which to me looked like a perfect volcano of smothered desires; [2.2] Such was the acquisition to the feminine department of the house, and we congratulated ourselves on the increased prospect of sport, as Frank had expressed to me considerable compunctions as to taking liberties with one's own sisters; [3.1.1] her large, full, dark eyes seemed to read my very soul as she extended her hand and drew me to a seat by her side; [4.2] such a display of pearly white teeth, I never saw before, and the very thought that they might perhaps be soon employed in love bites on my tender-headed prick filled me with maddening lust to possess myself of their owner.
4. The lists only include noun phrases mentioning external and internal female genitalia, on the one hand, and external male genitalia on the other; such noun phrases are either complex (namely, determiner + premodifier + nominal head + postmodifier) or figurative or both. The lists hence do not comprise: noun phrases that are both unmodified (i.e. possessive pronoun or possessive noun + nominal head only) and non-metaphorical – that is to say, ‘her sister's quim’ and ‘my prick’ are left out, the modified non-metaphorical ‘her pouting slit’ and the unmodified metaphorical ‘my affair’ are not; terms hinting at other body parts than the vulva, the vagina or the penis (e.g. ‘her beautifully wrinkled brown bum-hole’ or ‘the part she thought was only made for another purpose’); and general terms for body parts (e.g. ‘our budding charms’ or ‘your extraordinary beauties’).
5. the seat of love (twice); the tight little grotto of love which I had taken possession of; the shrine of love (twice); Sophie's cabinet of love; the dart of love (twice); my engine of love; our rampant engines of love; my excited engine of love; the real tree of love; my Cupid's Dart; the gods of love; your love-dart.
6. the seat of bliss; the path of bliss; the soft juicy folds of her divine organ of bliss; the dear sweet thing, which had afforded her such exquisite bliss.
7. See also ‘the staff of life’ and ‘my staff of life’, where the nominal head ‘staff’ appears to denote a rod or sceptre held as a mark of authority or office, such as a bishop's crosier.
8. For the figure of the incestuous brother, see Section 1.1; for incest in pornography, see Sigel (Citation2005, 104); for lesbian incest in pornography, see Brown (Citation2003, 135–154).
9. The use of irony and parody is an aspect embodying the work of several key authors in the evolution of erotic literature. For instance, ironic paradox and incompatible tenets eventually reconciled can be also found in Fanny Hill. Although ‘The novel itself claims its legitimacy as morally educative literature in its “tail-piece of morality”’ (Haslanger Citation2011, 180), irony arises powerfully both at a semantic level (from the pun ‘tail-piece’) and, more importantly, at a discursive level (from the closing marriage of the prostitute Fanny).
10. her tight little cunny; the tight sheath of her vagina; the tight little grotto of love which I had taken possession of; her stiff little clitoris; her deliciously tight cunt; the tight passage; Polly's tight sheath; her tight scabbard; the hairless little pussey of Polly; this little hairless jewel; your dear little pussey; her stiff little clitoris; her delicate little pussey.
11. For reasons of space, this issue is not discussed here, but it has been dealt with by several scholars (see, among others, Kincaid Citation1992; Nelson Citation2004, 21).
12. the blood-stained quim of little Polly; your blood-stained affair; his blood-stained weapon, thrusting in and out of her shattered virginity; her wounded quim; the wounded slit of her young friend.
13. his hard, stiff prick; his beautiful red-headed cock, as it stood in all its manly glory, stiff and hard as marble, with the hot blood looking ready to burst from his distended veins; my stiff affair, naked and palpitating with unsatisfied desire; a stiff prick; my prick, which stood again as hard as ivory; a long thing as hard as iron, which they pleased the ladies by shoving up their bellies. Walter's and Frank's penises are sometimes represented as limp (‘my limp tool’, ‘Frank's limp affair’, ‘my rather enervated tool’, ‘their exhausted cocks’), but only immediately after sexual intercourse and for a short time.
14. my ready cock, which was in a bursting state; my bursting breeches; his beautiful red-headed cock, as it stood in all its manly glory, stiff and hard as marble, with the hot blood looking ready to burst from his distended veins; my bursting prick; bursting pricks; my swelling prick; my impetuous steed; my impatient steed; my steed; the impatient prisoner.
15. my eager prick; the head of his eager cock; our eager cocks; my excited engine of love; my stiff affair, naked and palpitating with unsatisfied desire.
16. our rampant engines of love; my still rampant cock; the rampant condition of my cock; my rampant cock throbbing against her belly; big pricks, as rampant as could be wished; the top of my throbbing prick; the unruly state of the jewel in your trousers.
17. your blood-stained affair; his blood-stained weapon, thrusting in and out of her shattered virginity; my weapon; the red head of ‘Cupid's Battering Ram’; the spike she so burned to have thrust into her. In an extended metaphor, if the penis is a weapon, female genitalia will consequently be ‘the mark between her legs’ and, after intercourse, ‘her still tender cunt’.
18. my delighted cock; my delighted prick (twice); my enraptured prick.
19. my rather enervated tool; their exhausted cocks.
20. Readers in the field of linguistics will recognize these features as realizations of the Hallidayan Mental process type and of Emotive, Desiderative, Cognitive and Perceptive sub-process types (Halliday and Matthiessen Citation2004). Given these processes, the two characters' male organs are construed as the Senser; namely, an entity, prototypically but not necessarily human, engaged in conscious processing. With regard to set 4 it appears to convey Relational processes, which construe being and set up a relationship between two concepts; that is, an entity (the Carrier, here the penis) is assigned a property (the Attribute, here, for example, being blood-stained).
21. See also the noun phrase ‘her very entrails’ in the clause ‘I shot a stream of sperm up into her very entrails’ (Anonymous [Citation1968] Citation1996, 112). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun ‘entrail’, now usually found in the plural, denotes both the internal organs of a human or other animal and, figuratively, the innermost parts of something, here the female body. Its use in the text therefore pays tribute to a male potency so strong that it extends beyond the woman's genitalia and invades other areas of the body not usually considered to be the terrain of sex.